Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a communication system and method thereof, and more particularly to a communication system with a plurality of serial ports for automatically identifying a plurality of device types and communication protocols and method thereof.
Description of Prior Art
Although computers are widely used in a variety of application fields, the computers continue to maintain and expand the usage fields are due to the shrinkage and function development of integrated circuits. Since too many application functions are expanded to be used continuously, all the application functions cannot be added to the computer and therefore, the computer only includes basic application programs and standard expanding interfaces are provided by the computers so that the user needs to expand the interface devices of peripheral circuits based on desired different functions, which is an usual solution. The standard expanding interfaces provided by the personal computers (PCs) includes Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) protocol, Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) and Universal Serial Bus (USB), where ISA is a bus protocol defined by the computer, PCI is a local bus defined by peripheral devices, and USB is a serial communication interface.
Conventionally, Disk Operation System (DOS) executed in the computer provides the function of input/output (I/O) for application program developer to read/write the data from or into the circuits of the expanded interfaces, which is suitable to develop newly added applications with real-time requirement, such as feedback control, data acquisition and data broadcasting. Since the PC is the open platform architecture and provides the automatization and software engineers with a common platform to develop a variety of applications, it encourages to the common use of computers. However, the PC with the open platform architecture causes some following side effects. When a variety of application programs are executed in the same platform, it tends to cause the operation failure due to the conflict between resource usage of software and hardware, thereby resulting in unstable status of the PC. To solve the stability of computer system, Microsoft changes the operation mode of directly controlling the circuit on the expanding interface by the user. Thus, a real-time control application programs with a PC-based feature cannot be performed by general software engineers, which considerably limits the application development to the software engineers in the open platform architecture.
With the rapid development of manufacturing technique and research integrated circuit sensors, the operation capability of micro-control unit (MCU) goes beyond the core capability of micro-control unit core in the operating system of DOS. Since many micro-control units provides better high program languages, such as C language complier, more and more real-time application programs of computers are developed by MCU. However, due to the lack of standard expanding interfaces, such as PO/DOS/ISA interface protocols, the software engineers inevitably encounter the problem of hardware circuits expanding when the MCU performs newly added real-time application programs provided by the ICs. One solution is to redevelop new system with newly added ICs, which spends a lot of manufacturing costs. Another solution is that an extending flat cable is connected from newly added ICs to another circuit board, i.e. breadboard with connection points, for expanding new circuits, thereby increase the utilization inconvenience.
Consequently, there is a need to develop a communication system to solve the aforementioned problems.